The Man In The Palace

Hamid Karzai and the dilemma of being Afghanistan’s President.

On May 11th, riots broke out in the city of Jalalabad, in eastern Afghanistan. The violence followed a Newsweek story—which has since been retracted—on new allegations that American interrogators at Guantánamo Bay had desecrated the Koran. In the next few days, the protests spread to the capital, Kabul, and throughout the country. In some provincial towns, police fired into crowds. But early on there were signs that the violence had less to do with Newsweek than with Afghanistan’s President, Hamid Karzai.

On the first night of rioting, copies of an anonymous letter circulated in the streets of Kabul. This Night Letter, as it was called, was a vehement exhortation to Afghans to oppose Karzai, whom it accused of being un-Islamic, an ally of the Taliban, and a “U.S.A. servant.” The letter said that Karzai had put the interests of his “evil master” ahead of those of Afghans, and it called for leaders who were proven patriots, mujahideen—a synonym, in this case, for members of the Northern Alliance, many of whom are now warlords and regional strongmen—to defy him. The timing was opportune: Karzai was on a trip to Europe, in search of financial backing. His next destination was Washington, where he planned to discuss a pact that would guarantee the United States a long-term military presence in Afghanistan.

Karzai seemed unsure of how to respond. Even as the unrest continued, he stuck to his itinerary and, from Brussels, called the riots a “manifestation of democracy.” When he finally arrived home, several days later, he held a press conference, at which he blamed unspecified “enemies of peace” for the violence. He asked, “Who are they who have such enmity with Afghanistan, a nation that is begging for money to build the country and construct buildings, and during the night they come and destroy it?”

The nineteen thousand American and eight thousand nato troops stationed in Afghanistan were placed on high alert, and government officials met with protesters. By the time the violence abated, at least seventeen people were dead, and government buildings and aid-agency offices had been torched. It was the largest display of anti-American feeling since the fall of the Taliban, in late 2001.

The next week, the Times published, in rapid succession, a State Department memorandum saying that Karzai was “unwilling to assert strong leadership” to end drug trafficking—Afghanistan is the source of most of the world’s heroin—and a new report on the abuse of prisoners in Afghanistan. The prisoner-abuse story described how American soldiers had beaten two Afghan men to death at Bagram airbase, north of Kabul. One of them was a twenty-two-year-old cabdriver who appeared to have no connection to terrorism. Karzai was in the incongruous position of defending his record as a steadfast ally in the war on drugs while expressing horror at the reports of American abuse.

There are other contradictions. Afghans don’t generally question Karzai’s good intentions, but they complain about his ineffectiveness and the corruption in his government. Karzai is an odd combination of decency and diffidence, a committed democrat but a regal figure who is comfortable leaving the business of governing to others—including his American advisers. Habiba Sarabi, whom Karzai appointed governor of Bamiyan province, making her Afghanistan’s first woman governor, said of him, “He was quite popular during the transitional period. And he still is, because there are no alternatives to him. His character and his democratic inclinations are higher than those of all the others.” Unfortunately, she said, “sometimes he makes promises he can’t follow up.”

When I spoke to Karzai in Kabul, not long before the riots, he told me repeatedly that Afghans had actively sought close ties to the United States. When the Taliban were in power, “it was Afghan people that kept going to see the U.S. and asking it to come and help Afghanistan—and also asking to help the U.S.,” he said. “We were the persuaders. We brought the U.S. in. It’s been a success. And that’s why I got the vote.” Now he was confronting the limits of that success, and he appeared surprised and aggrieved.

Last week, as he headed to Washington, Karzai said that he would demand “justice” for Afghan prisoners and control over U.S. military operations in Afghanistan. The requests only underscored his lack of authority; the alleged abuse had taken place in his own country, and if American troops weren’t there, Karzai almost certainly wouldn’t be, either. As it turned out, Karzai signed an agreement at his meeting with President Bush that affirmed the U.S. military’s right to operate freely. And when, at a press conference, with Bush at his side, he was asked about prisoner abuse, he said that it made him “sad,” but quickly added that the actions of a few soldiers should not sully the image of the U.S. government. After his brief flash of assertiveness, he seemed more a supplicant than ever. His relationship with Washington—which gave him security, status, and a certain amount of pride—revealed itself in all its dependency and weakness.

When I arrived in Kabul this spring, after Afghanistan’s most severe winter in many years, the snow on the jagged black mountains that ring the city had begun to melt, and the streets, most of them unpaved, were either clogged with mud and raw sewage or, on the days the sun shone, concealed by swirling clouds of dust. But it was easy to see how profoundly Kabul had changed since the fall of the Taliban. The last time I was in Afghanistan, in the summer of 2002, the honeycomb of wattle-and-daub houses on the slopes surrounding the city was mostly uninhabited. The ghost houses gaped at the city below—their windows, their tin roofs, their doors had all been ransacked. Now, as refugees have flooded back to Afghanistan—three million have returned since the fall of the Taliban brought an end to major fighting—the houses have mostly been reoccupied. Down on the flatlands, new neighborhoods have appeared among the ruins of old ones. Several high-rise commercial buildings, with colored mirrored glass, Dubai style, are being built. The population of Kabul has multiplied, from about a million to an estimated three million inhabitants, and it is still growing.

In the narrow streets of the city center, thousands of newly imported cars compete with cyclists, water buffalo, and poor Hazara men, who take the most menial jobs, pulling carts. The armored convoys of the nato peacekeeping forces and the Humvees and Land Rovers of American and British troops speed to and from their bases. Other Americans, out of uniform and accompanied by gunmen, move around in large S.U.V.s with smoked-glass windows. Most Afghans assume, probably correctly, that they are Special Forces commandos or C.I.A. operatives; in any case, they are the most overt reminder that a war against the Taliban and Al Qaeda continues mostly out of sight.

The American operations, which have confined the Taliban mainly to the backcountry and the Pakistani border region, are extremely controversial, especially among Pashtuns, Afghanistan’s largest ethnic group. (Most of the Taliban are Pashtuns, as is Karzai.) Ahmad Shah Ahmadzai, a prominent Pashtun politician, told me that, before the recent revelations, when he visited Karzai as part of a delegation to protest the U.S. military’s raids and its detention of people from Pashtun communities, Karzai had said, “What can I do? The Americans don’t listen to me.” Ahmadzai threw up his hands in a gesture of incredulity and contempt. “Karzai is President with the will of the Afghan people, but in some aspects he is an American puppet, too,” he said.

Karzai was appointed interim President at a U.N.-sponsored meeting of exiles in Bonn in December, 2001, two months into the American bombing campaign. A Presidential election was postponed twice because of threats from the Taliban, but it was finally held, last October, and Karzai won, with fifty-five per cent of the vote. (Parliamentary elections have yet to take place.) His main opponent, Yunis Qanouni, a former Northern Alliance official, achieved only sixteen per cent.

Now Karzai presides over a country of about twenty-nine million citizens, most of whom are poor and illiterate, with an economy that relies almost entirely on international aid and the illicit harvest of poppies, the raw material for opium and heroin. The drug business employs some 2.3 million Afghans, with revenues equal to sixty per cent of the legal G.D.P. Since 2001, the poppy harvest has soared fifteen hundred per cent; by most estimates, Afghanistan is fast becoming a narco-state. The unemployment rate is about thirty per cent and the crime rate is spiralling upward.

And yet this year nearly five million children, including nearly two million girls, attended school, compared with under a million total in 2001. Women now have the right to vote, and four million registered for the last election; three of Karzai’s thirty-two cabinet ministers are women. International aid organizations have trouble operating outside of Kabul, because of security concerns—dozens of relief workers have been assassinated—but teams led by British and American forces are laying roads and building bridges and schools in much of the country. (While Operation Iraqi Freedom has cost the lives of more than sixteen hundred American servicemen and women, a hundred and forty-four American soldiers have died in and around Afghanistan.)

How much credit or blame Karzai can take for these developments is unclear. Most of Karzai’s government ministers have an American counterpart who is a member of the so-called Afghan Reconstruction Team. One American official in Kabul described the team to me as a sort of shadow government: “Khalilzad’s cabinet”—a reference to Zalmay Khalilzad, who has been the American Ambassador in Kabul since 2003. The official said that the team members acted as “senior counsellors” to the Afghan government. He noted, for example, that they helped write Karzai’s inauguration speech.

Virtually every Afghan I spoke to was troubled by Karzai’s close relationship with Khalilzad. The Ambassador is often referred to, sarcastically, as “the second President,” or, sometimes, simply as President Khalilzad. Habiba Sarabi told me, “The problem is that Khalilzad makes policy pronouncements himself, and speaks more strongly than the President does. So people naturally think he is more powerful than President Karzai.”

Khalilzad, who was born in Afghanistan, seems to enjoy the image that he has acquired as Afghanistan’s American viceroy. He was an official in the Reagan and George H. W. Bush Administrations, and has known Karzai for many years because of his work as a foreign-policy analyst and in Afghan exile circles. On the half-dozen occasions I saw Karzai and Khalilzad together, they did nothing to conceal the warmth of their friendship. It was obvious that Karzai was closer to him than to many of his own ministers.

The American official in Kabul, referring to Khalilzad by his nickname, said that, until recently, “it was like Zal had to hold Karzai’s hand even when he went to the bathroom. He consulted him on everything before he did anything.” But this official also told me that, since the election, things had begun to change: “Now it’s more like he calls Zal afterward and tells him what he’s done and asks him what he thinks.” An American adviser to Karzai said, “He and Zal are really close friends, who spend more time together than most husbands and wives; they eat dinner together almost every night. Karzai doesn’t just consult him for decisions—he also gets emotional support from him.” Earlier this month, President Bush nominated Khalilzad to replace John Negroponte as the U.S. Ambassador to Iraq. The official said, “Personally, I think it’s a healthy thing that Zal is leaving. It will give Karzai a chance to become his own man. And it won’t be healthy just for Karzai; it’ll be healthy for Afghanistan, too.”

When I arrived for my first interview with Karzai at Kabul’s old royal palace, where he lives and works, I found him walking in the garden with Khalilzad. He gave me a friendly wave, as did the Ambassador, and said that he would be with me shortly.

The palace is a complex of buildings in an eclectic mixture of architectural styles and periods: there are fortifications with turrets, slate-roofed roundhouses, and a lovely Victorian mansion. Some of the buildings are ruins, with caved-in roofs, struck by missiles in Afghanistan’s recent wars. Karzai’s residence is a graceless modernist concrete structure built in the sixties, for one of Afghanistan’s former princes, with a small garden, a swimming pool, and a tennis court in back. I was shown into his sitting room, which had a homey but unintentionally retro look, with wood-veneer panelling on the walls. The furniture—upholstered in floral velour—was similar to what I had seen in middle-class Afghan homes.

When Karzai entered, he apologized for the delay—he had been asking Khalilzad if American helicopters could be sent to rescue victims of a flood. Karzai is a lithe man of medium height, with pale skin, a prominent nose, and large, expressive brown eyes. He has a salt-and-pepper beard clipped short, and a finely woven white wool patou, or man’s shawl, was thrown loosely around his shoulders.

Although he is the leader of one of the most destitute countries on earth, Karzai has an uncanny, if dissonant, sense of sartorial panache. Westerners often assume that his elaborate outfits are the traditional dress of his people, the Pashtuns. In fact, Karzai assembles them as homages to Afghanistan’s disparate ethnic groups—they are costumes, roughly akin to the baseball caps that an American politician might wear while campaigning in different parts of the country. The striped green silk chapan cape that Karzai wore to President Bush’s State of the Union address in 2002 is Uzbek; the gray karakul hat he often wears is traditionally Tajik. When he is among other Pashtuns, he often wears a turban, as they do.

A few days before our meeting, I had watched Karzai speak at a ceremony in honor of International Women’s Day, at the Hotel Intercontinental in Kabul. The event was the first public appearance by Karzai’s wife, Zinat, who is thirty-five years old and was trained as an obstetrician and gynecologist. Like Karzai, Zinat is from the southern city of Kandahar and moved with her family to Quetta, Pakistan, during Afghanistan’s civil war, where she worked with Afghan refugee women. Karzai, who is forty-seven, married her only six years ago; the marriage was an arranged one, and there is a great deal of speculation about their relationship. They do not have children. During her husband’s address, Zinat, a pleasant-looking woman in a modest black chador, sat in the front row of the audience, along with other V.I.P.s. I asked Karzai whether security concerns had kept her from attending such events before, despite her role as First Lady.

“It was Women’s Day,” he said, smiling warily. “She wanted to go to the last Women’s Day. But somehow it was messed up. Somebody came to me the day before, and said, ‘Well, can she come?,’ and I said yes and I meant to ask her.” But, he said, “I forgot.” He finally called to invite her just as he was leaving for the event. “She said, ‘Get lost, too late,’ “ Karzai laughed. “This time, I remembered.”

His own presence at the event was unusual; he rarely appears outside the palace, even in Kabul. He had arrived surrounded by two dozen heavily armed American guards. His security detail includes scores of American contractors working for DynCorp International, which has a multimillion-dollar contract with the State Department, and a smaller number of agents from the State Department’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security. Karzai told me that early in his Presidency Lieutenant General Dan McNeill, the first commander of coalition forces in Afghanistan, said to him, “Look, let’s get you a security environment. You don’t have any professionals here—anybody can get in and blow up this place.” He said that he resisted the offer, but then “I started to consult. Everybody, including the Chief Justice, you know what they said? They said, ‘Ring them as soon as possible, so that you can work independently, so that this place becomes independent.’ “ The Afghan people “know the means of this country,” Karzai said. “They know what we can do, what we can’t do.”

In truth, most Afghans are far less sanguine. During the election campaign, Karzai was embarrassed when his American security men forced him to return to Kabul after a rocket was fired near his helicopter as it was about to land outside the town of Gardez. There are reasons for such caution; Karzai survived an assassination attempt in 2002, and three ministers in the interim government were murdered. But his opponents have used the fact of his U.S. protection to portray him as subservient, and to question his patriotism. Faheem Dashty, the editor of the Kabul Weekly, told me, “I don’t understand why it is he cannot find Afghans to defend him. He’s had three years in power now. If he had wanted to train Afghans, it’s more than enough time. It can mean only that he doesn’t trust Afghans.”

Despite his American support, Karzai has trouble convincing Afghans that he can confront the warlords or the thousands of Taliban fighters who are still at large. Karzai recently offered amnesty to the Taliban on the condition that they renounce violence. I asked Karzai about the offer, which many Afghans saw as a betrayal.

“Afghanistan had bad days before the Taliban as well,” Karzai replied. “From the time of the Soviets and from the time of the mujahideen groups—Afghanistan suffered for so many years. We have practically pardoned all those people who were among the murderers of the Afghan people. . . . Now either we have to bring people in to trial and seek justice or we have to forget about it, and live a life by forgetting the past.”

When I asked if there was a middle ground, he replied, “What is in the middle? If I go to the middle ground, I will not be bringing total peace to this country. If I can reduce the bomb blasts in Afghanistan by bringing some of the Taliban back home, and put things in order by making them behave all right, then I should do that. Now, if you ask me as a citizen of Afghanistan, ‘Karzai, what is it that you want, justice or peace?,’ I would say, of course, both—most human beings would. But, if you ask me as the President of Afghanistan, then I have to say, ‘Peace gives you continuation of life. Justice does not, necessarily.’ “ He added, “When we can afford it, we can have justice.”

Karzai’s relationship with the warlords is ambiguous: many of them fought against the Taliban as part of the Northern Alliance and, until recently, Karzai had little choice but to share power with them. (As an exile in Pakistan, he opposed the Taliban, but he was not a member of the Northern Alliance, which was dominated by Tajiks and Uzbeks.) When the United States military invaded Afghanistan, in October, 2001, it formed a tactical partnership with the Northern Alliance. The Alliance worked with American Special Forces and the C.I.A., and helped to direct air strikes. As the Taliban defenses in Kabul weakened, the U.S. asked the Northern Alliance to wait to enter the capital until a coalition government that would better reflect Afghanistan’s ethnic mix could be formed. But the Northern Alliance took the capital anyway, and, from that position of strength, was able to demand the most powerful jobs in Karzai’s cabinet. Mohammed Fahim, its military chief, became Karzai’s Defense Minister and Vice-President, despite allegations that he is a major figure in Afghanistan’s criminal underground. Last July, just before the Presidential campaign officially began, Karzai dropped him as his running mate. According to Americans I spoke to in Afghanistan, it was Ambassador Khalilzad who persuaded Karzai to make this move.

Meanwhile, General Abdul Rashid Dostum, perhaps Afghanistan’s most notorious warlord, has been offered the post of chief of staff to the commander-in-chief of the armed forces—that is, Karzai. Dostum, an Uzbek who dominates a large swath of northern Afghanistan, is viewed by most human-rights organizations as among the worst war criminals in the country. One recent charge is that under his orders hundreds of Taliban fighters, who had surrendered to his forces, were locked in airless shipping containers and left to die of asphyxiation and thirst. Dostum is extremely wealthy, has a large and well-armed militia, and is reported to be heavily involved in narcotics trafficking. The American adviser to Karzai argued that the new job was mostly symbolic—“It’s basically a broom closet down the hall”—and was the best way to reduce his power. But Dostum has not yet arrived in the capital, and many in Kabul question whether he will ever assume his post.

When I mentioned Dostum, Karzai offered a conflicted reply: “I am quite a sentimental person. I might be hurt a lot, when I see something hurt. And this is the only time where I sat down and said, ‘Hamid, here you don’t get sentimental—you think of this country’s future, and provide an opportunity for all to work.’ The countryside understands it very well. Afghans are extremely pragmatic.” Before he made the appointment, he added, “I consulted extensively. I called all the former jihadi leaders, I called lots of other people, and then I made the appointment. I never do that without consultation. You know, I’m accused of too much consultation. That’s my problem.”

Hamid Karzai is the fourth of eight children born to Abdul Ahad Karzai, the former deputy speaker of Afghanistan’s royal parliament and paramount chief of the Populzai tribe, and his wife, Durkho. The Karzais are connected by marriage to the former Afghan king Zahir Shah. (Although the monarchy was abolished in 1973, Karzai has declared Zahir Shah, who is ninety, the “father of the country” and allows him to live at the palace.) The family’s ancestral home is in the village of Karz, in the parched flatlands just outside Kandahar.

Only two of Karzai’s seven siblings live in Afghanistan. The eldest, Abdul Ahmed, is an engineer in Maryland. The next two, Qayum and Mahmoud, own a chain of Afghan restaurants—called Helmand, after Afghanistan’s major river—in San Francisco, the Baltimore area, and Cambridge, Massachusetts. Shawali, who is younger than Hamid, is involved in business ventures in Afghanistan, as is Ahmed Wali, who is also Hamid’s personal representative in Kandahar. The seventh son is Abdul Wali, a biochemist at Stony Brook University, on Long Island. Fouzia, the only sister, lives in Maryland.

When I visited Kandahar in late March, Qayum, the second-eldest brother, was visiting from the United States. Qayum, who is a slightly fleshier version of Hamid, recounted how his father, who exemplified the old order—the so-called “feudals”—was arrested in a wave of Leninist terror after the Communist coup in 1978. He was jailed for two years. Upon his release, he left the country and went to Quetta, where most of the family had already fled. Hamid was studying in India, at Himachal Pradesh University. Once he completed his B.A. and M.A., in political science, he followed the family to Quetta. There he joined the Afghan National Liberation Front, one of the more moderate of the mujahideen factions then fighting the Soviets. Hamid was fluent in six languages—English, French, Hindi, and Urdu, as well as Dari and Pashto, Afghanistan’s two official languages—and he became the spokesman for the front. (Hamid told me that he occasionally crossed the border to visit mujahideen on the battlefield, and that he had carried a weapon but had never used it.)

Qayum offered to show me the family’s village, Karz. We drove in a Toyota Land Cruiser for twenty minutes or so on a rutted dirt track between fields of grapes, which are harvested for raisins, not wine. Qayum told the driver to stop next to a large family cemetery. The tomb of Abdul Ahad Karzai dominated the cemetery, a raised plinth under a canopied roof.

In 1999, Abdul Ahad Karzai was gunned down outside his home in Quetta, presumably by the Taliban. Hamid Karzai and his siblings, together with hundreds of other relatives and tribespeople, defied the Taliban by bringing his body across the border in a vast convoy. They drove a hundred and twenty miles to Kandahar, and then to Karz, for the burial ceremony. “It was a show of force—it was very audacious,” Qayum said. “People said that it was the greatest number of cars ever assembled in Kandahar—or not since the kings used to come. At one count, there were four hundred cars in the procession.” Afterward, Hamid was proclaimed head of the Populzai tribe.

Karz is a poor, featureless place, a sunstruck maze of flat-roofed mud dwellings and walls. Qayum pointed out a building that had been the primary school he attended as a boy. The Karzais had had some vineyards but were not one of the great landowning families of Kandahar, Qayum said. Indicating a tiny mud-walled shop, he said, “I used to think that was a huge supermarket.” The family moved to Kabul in 1965, when his father became a member of parliament. He was in ninth grade and Hamid was seven years old.

We walked to the collapsed mud walls of what had been the Karzais’ home. A displaced family was living in a tent pitched in the middle of the courtyard. Qayum said that when they were growing up he thought Hamid might pursue some sort of humanitarian work. “He always had an enormously soft heart,” Qayum said. “Beggars used to come to our house and ask for Hamid.” In 2000, he said, “Hamid was visiting us in the U.S. and watching TV, and there was an appeal from Save the Children or one of those international humanitarian organizations, and there was a picture of an Afghan girl sitting there, surrounded by garbage, and he became highly emotional—unbelievable! Tears came to his eyes. He said, ‘Can you please turn this off?’ He just couldn’t handle it.” Qayum added, “I never thought that he would become a politician.”

In late 2001, Qayum was in Bonn, at the conference where the post-Taliban leadership was being negotiated. He recalled telephoning Hamid, who was in Afghanistan, to inform him that there was a movement to nominate him for President. Hamid Karzai had qualities that made him an ideal compromise candidate: he was a moderate but safely traditionalist Pashtun from a well-known patrician family. He was also favored by King Zahir Shah. Qayum told him, “This is the toughest moment in Afghan history. Are you sure you want to do this?” Hamid replied, “If not me, then who is going to do it?”

Every other day or so, Karzai holds an audience in Gul Khana, or Flower House, the part of the royal palace where he has his office. One afternoon this spring, he received a delegation from Badakhshan, the northeasternmost province of Afghanistan. I joined the visitors—some wearing loose-fitting shalwar kameez and felt pakul hats, others in military uniforms or Western suits—as they were shown to a long row of tables. A couple of Afghan cameramen stood behind a tripod with a video camera, and Afghan and American armed guards took up positions around the room.

After a few minutes, Karzai entered, and hailed the visitors enthusiastically. He was wearing an elegant blue overcoat and a karakul hat. Everyone fell silent for an opening prayer, and then one of the Badakhshanis stood up to speak.

He began by praising Karzai, who was, he said, a great man, a good man. He reminded Karzai that Badakhshanis had always been loyal to the kings of Afghanistan. And they were loyal to Karzai. But lawlessness and warlordism defined daily life in Badakhshan. “People are beginning to tell us that we shouldn’t have voted for you, because you cannot defend us.” He said that those who supported Karzai needed something in return.

Karzai said sympathetically, “It will happen, it will happen.”

The next speaker said that he had been Karzai’s local chairman during the Presidential campaign last fall, then he said, “Lately, people have been coming up to me and saying, ‘You haven’t fulfilled your promises.’ “ He told Karzai that the solution was to give his people jobs. At that, Karzai called for the video camera to be turned off—“so that we can talk freely.”

Another man, a member of Afghanistan’s small Ismaili Shiite sect, took the microphone. “Our province is controlled by smugglers, and we have seven districts where we have no local people at all in the official posts,” he said. “Everywhere we go, they say, ‘You are not Tajik or Hazara; you’re not Uzbek or Pashtun. There is no job for you.’ “

Karzai looked displeased. “What are you saying? That if you’re not from a certain tribe you don’t get a job?”

“Yes,” replied the man. “Especially in the National Army.”

“This is wrong. Everyone in Afghanistan, each tribe, has the same rights, and this is promised in the constitution. What are these people thinking? I prefer an orphan, a child without a father, or, even better, someone who doesn’t know what nationality he is than such people!”

Karzai told an aide to get the Interior Minister on the telephone. When the aide handed him his cell phone, Karzai told the minister what he had heard: “These are educated people telling me these things, and I want to discuss this with you. When can you see me?” Karzai then had a call placed to his Army chief, Bismillah Khan. After a brief exchange, he turned to the men in the room and said, “Bismillah Khan says he has space open for officers and soldiers and you should send him your candidates.” Everyone applauded.

The lights in the chandeliers that hung from the domed ceiling of the meeting room flickered on and off—presumably as a result of one of the city’s frequent power shortages. Karzai noticed a Mongol-looking elderly man who had stood up, and urged him forward. The man had been sitting quietly with several companions, all of them wearing high tasselled fur hats and long black leather boots with their trousers tucked in, Cossack style.

The old man introduced himself as Abdul Rashid, the khan of the Small Pamir, a region at the far end of the Wakhan Corridor, a slender neck of mountainous land—the most inaccessible corner of Badakhshan. The Wakhan borders Tajikistan on the north and Pakistan on the south, and juts into western China. (The khan’s people are ethnic Kirghiz.) The khan had a wispy beard and thick glasses, and spoke in a reedy, tremulous voice. He said that he and his companions had waited three months to see Karzai, and it had taken them four weeks to reach the capital from their village; they had made much of the journey on foot.

“There are no roads where I live,” the khan explained. “I am thinking that the Afghan government has forgotten us.” There were no schools or hospitals, or policemen to guard the frontier against smugglers or terrorists. After several years of drought, his people had little food. He was ashamed to say it, but they were also afflicted by opium addiction, and needed clinics.

Karzai interrupted him. “Don’t worry. I am going to arrange food—I will send you back with food on helicopters,” he said. “You will not go home without a solution to your problems. We will arrange what documentation is needed for the clinics, and we will get you your food.”

The other Pamiris rose to their feet and walked toward Karzai. One of them produced an embroidered robe and a high peaked cap of many colors, similar to the caps worn by Tibetan lamas. Karzai put on the robe and the fantastic hat, placed his own karakul on the khan’s head, and beamed at the men. The video camera was back on now, and the room had an air of celebration. Suddenly, a man dressed in military fatigues took the microphone and called out, “Our province is controlled by mafias and drug traffickers!,” but Karzai cut him off, saying, “We will solve it.” Surrounded by his security men, he headed for the door, leaving his visitors behind.

Karzai has not been to Karz, his home village, for years. “The last time I saw it was when it was bombed by the Soviets, in 1988,” he said. Six months later, the Soviets pulled out, but the fight against their Afghan proxies continued for three years. Finally, in 1992, Najibullah, the last Afghan Communist ruler, abandoned his office, and the mujahideen returned from their base in Pakistan. “We all came together,” Karzai recalled. “We spent the night at the edge of the city, and the next morning we all came to Kabul.”

As they drove into the city, Karzai said, his elation gave way to foreboding. “I noticed people looking from behind their drawn curtains. We heard a lot of firing in the air. By the second day, it appeared that the city was in the hands of too many different groups, that our lives were going to become more difficult.”

Almost immediately, factional fighting broke out. Karzai eventually became the deputy foreign minister in the transitional mujahideen government of President Burhanuddin Rabbani and Ahmed Shah Massoud, his charismatic military chief, who later commanded the Northern Alliance. In a series of shifting battlefield alliances, Dostum, who had been with the Soviets, joined forces first with Rabbani and Massoud and then with Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a radical Islamist. Thousands of civilians were killed, and large sections of Kabul, which until then had remained intact, were levelled.

During the fighting, Karzai fled. I had heard many tales about what happened to him. There were reports that he had been imprisoned and mistreated, or even tortured, and then had escaped. Karzai’s rivals made disparaging jokes and suggested that he was a coward. I asked him to clarify what had happened.

Karzai coughed, as if uncomfortable, but began talking. “It was at the height of this extremely bad period for Afghanistan,” he said. One day, when he was at the Foreign Ministry, one of Rabbani’s men came and told him that the President wanted to see him. Karzai was suspicious, but he went along. The man drove Karzai to the office of the intelligence services and led him into a small, dirty room with a bare radiator. Muhammad Aref, who later served as the head of Karzai’s own intelligence services, came in. (“I have never mentioned it to him,” Karzai said.) Aref and the other man began to interrogate Karzai, asking about alliances against Rabbani. “I said, ‘I know nothing of this.’ They were very, very nervous, almost pale with nervousness! Just as they asked me the second question, a big bang was heard, and the room filled with smoke and debris from glass and all that, and everybody ran out, and I also ran out. I saw that the roof was not there. I saw that sunshine was coming in.”

A rocket had hit the building. In the confusion that followed, Karzai made his way outside, and back to his office. “That’s it. I came to the Foreign Ministry, and the people there were shocked—I was bleeding, I had some shrapnel.”

Karzai hired a taxi and began a circuitous trip, by car and on foot, until he was safely in Pakistan. He said that Rabbani later telephoned him and his father to apologize, saying that he hadn’t known about the interrogation beforehand. But Karzai did not go back. The people around the President, he realized, had succumbed to paranoia. The next time Karzai returned to Kabul, it was as Afghanistan’s President.

During the next few years of civil war, the United States saw the relatively unknown Taliban as potential peacemakers—and so, for a time, did Karzai, who knew many of the Taliban commanders from his years in the anti-Soviet jihad. Early on, he gave them money and weapons, in the belief that they would be the vehicle for what was then his dream—the restoration of the Pashtun monarchy of King Zahir Shah. In 1996, the Taliban seized power, and invited Karzai to become their U.N. Ambassador. He considered the idea, but decided against it.

“A lot of the jihad commanders in the field were very pragmatic people,” Karzai said. “Just some were very radical.” By radicals, he meant “puritanical—not politicized radical types,” he said. “They were very clean people. Almost all of them became the Taliban.” He added, “When the Taliban movement began, we saw it as an innocent movement. When I say ‘we,’ I mean we Afghans, a lot of us, me, my friends, many other members of this community. We thought they were people who wanted to help this country. But very soon we recognized that among them there were people who were not from Afghanistan, and who were horribly cruel to this place—Al Qaeda.”

After his father’s assassination, Karzai tried to get U.S. support for a Pashtun anti-Taliban movement. In 1999, he went to see Michael Sheehan, a counter-terrorism official in both the George H. W. Bush and Clinton Administrations. Sheehan told me, “At the time, Karzai was just a nobody, another Afghan exile—I never imagined he’d become the President. But I had heard he was prominent with the Pashtuns.” When they met, Sheehan said, “he seemed decent. He seemed like a nice guy, but I remember sitting there looking at him and wondering, How is he going to go after the Taliban?” Karzai talked about his plans, Sheehan said, and “we agreed on everything, about how evil the Taliban were, and the need to remove them. But what could I do for him? In terms of the Clinton Administration’s policy at the time, there wasn’t a lot of stomach for it.” That indifference continued into the Bush Administration, Sheehan said, especially since the Northern Alliance was losing ground. “There were a few guys in the C.I.A. pushing for the Northern Alliance, but nobody else wanted to touch it,” Sheehan said. “Afghanistan was seen as a loser, a sinkhole. Until 9/11, no one gave a shit.”

Karzai testified before the Senate in 2000, and also began to coördinate his efforts with Massoud, the military leader of the Northern Alliance. Then, on September 9, 2001, Massoud was assassinated by Al Qaeda suicide bombers. Two days later, the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were attacked.

When Karzai saw the first news reports, he said, “I knew immediately that the United States was going to come and help us.” Within two days, “hundreds of people arrived in Quetta to meet with me,” Karzai said. “The house became so crowded!” Among them was Khalilzad, who then worked for Condoleezza Rice, the national-security adviser. (During the Clinton Administration, Khalilzad worked for the Rand Corporation and was a consultant for Unocal, a company that wanted to build a pipeline through Afghanistan.) Three weeks later, in early October, 2001, “I moved into Afghanistan,” Karzai said excitedly. “Without any help, at that moment—nothing. I just walked into the country.”

Karzai and a few companions made their way to Tirin Kot, the main town in the rugged province of Oruzgan, north of Kandahar, and then on to a small village crisscrossed by running streams. He met with tribal elders, he said, “and that’s where I learned the significance of the United States to Afghanistan.”

The elders were skeptical of Karzai. “A cleric said, ‘Look, we know what you’re up to, we know that you want to defeat the Taliban, but do you have the backing of the U.S.? Will it give you planes, will it give you weapons, will it give you money, will it help you?’ And I said yes.” The cleric asked if Karzai had a satellite phone, and when he said yes told him, “All right, then, call the U.S.—ask them to come and bomb a place near the Taliban governor’s office, or the police headquarters in Tirin Kot. The next day, the people will go and take the town, without too much trouble.”

Karzai said he told the cleric that he couldn’t ask the U.S. to bomb his own country. The cleric pressed him. “He said, ‘Well, I’m sorry, this means that you are not interested in freeing the country—you’re only here to kill yourself and us, and our children and women, and we’re not going to die in a futile war of yours.’ “

Karzai stayed in the village for eleven days. The tribal council met and argued with him, telling him that Al Qaeda fighters were coming, and would attack. Finally, they said that the entire village was fleeing into the mountains for safety. “I was afraid there would be a massacre,” Karzai said. He decided to make the call.

“When I called the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad, I said, ‘I am Hamid Karzai.’ To my surprise, they knew who I was. I thought they had forgotten about me!

“They said, ‘Where the hell are you?’

“I said, ‘I am here in Oruzgan.’

“They said, ‘Do you have communications, how do we locate you? Do you have’—what is it called? G.T.S., G.P.S.? I didn’t even know what G.P.S. was. I said, ‘I have no idea. I know I am between Tirin Kot and the mountains.’ They said, ‘Fine.’ “

The Americans told Karzai to have his men light four fires on the hills around their position, at least a hundred metres apart, for the next two nights. They complied, and when Karzai called again the Americans told him, “We’ve found you.” Karzai paused and smiled broadly, and said, “Technology.”

The Americans told Karzai to set the fires again, so that they could drop a shipment of weapons. (“Hey, great story,” Karzai said to me, “if someone can make a movie out of it.”) He and the tribesmen lit the fires and waited. Hours passed, but the planes didn’t come. Karzai went to sleep in a shepherd’s hut. Then, at about one-thirty in the morning, he said, “someone came, saying, ‘Do you hear the planes?’ Just as I came out, a huge black plane flew over us, and then somebody shouted, ‘Oh, look at those white things!’ “ The white things were parachutes, and they were attached to crates of weapons.

“And, by the way, the people had already taken Tirin Kot,” Karzai continued. “Exactly what that man had asked me—while we were in the mountains, the U.S. planes had come and bombed some place in Tirin Kot. The next morning, a group of about fifty tribal chiefs went into the town, kicked the governor out of the place, kicked the police out of the place, and took control of the town.”

It was in Tirin Kot, two days later, that Karzai realized the tide had finally gone against the Taliban and in his favor. A defecting Taliban commander arrived there alone, and asked him for a letter of safe conduct. Karzai decided to write the letter, to see what would happen. Two days later, the man returned with pickup trucks and weapons for Karzai. “Then I said, ‘Wow, we are much wider and much more than we imagined.’ “

After the audience at the palace, I went to see the Pamiris at their lodgings, which they had described uncertainly as a “Presidential guesthouse.” This turned out to be a decrepit two-story building on a dirt lane off a back street. The grounds were strewn with litter. The room where the Pamiris were living was dark and cold; there was no electricity. The khan, a reserved, dignified man, said that he had decided to come to the capital nearly four months earlier, right after Karzai’s election victory. “Before, there was always war in our country, so we didn’t want to come down,” he said. “But now a great power has come to Afghanistan.” He meant the United States. “We came to congratulate Mr. Karzai for this and to ask him for his help.”

They left their homes before the winter snows blocked the mountain passes, and walked for seventeen days before reaching Wakhan, the nearest town with a dirt road. None of the men had been in touch with their families for months. “Where we live, there is not even a telephone,” the khan said. “We keep sheep and yaks and we live from their milk and cheese for seven months of the year, and our people make carpets from the animals’ wool. Afterward, we take the carpets on foot to the market at Wakhan.”

Their visits to Wakhan had exposed them to the drug trade. “We have opium addicts in every family,” the khan said. He estimated that one in four Pamiris was an addict, women as well as men. His own son-in-law, he said, “smokes for three days and then sleeps for three days.”

The Pamiris told me that their audience with Karzai had been arranged by General Fazal-Azim Mojadeddi, known as Zalmay Khan, who was born in a less remote part of Badakhshan. After my meeting with the Pamiris, Zalmay Khan invited me to his office, in the palace complex. He is a tall, burly, impeccably dressed man; according to his business card, he is in charge of “V.I.P. security” for the Presidency. When I asked him why the Pamiris had come to him, he said, “They don’t know anyone else.”

Zalmay Khan told me that he had come across the Pamiris when he was in the mountains as a mujahideen in Massoud’s army, in the early nineties. He stayed with them for three weeks. “It was August, and even then it was really cold,” he said. “The Pamiris live remote from one another—families are two and three kilometres apart. I asked why the population was so small and not increasing, and they told me it was because eighty per cent of their babies died before tasting their mother’s milk. They have no doctors to guide them, no health care.” As for their opium use, “They were a sad people, and this was a way for them to escape their problems.”

The Pamiris remembered Zalmay Khan, and when they heard on the radio that he had joined Karzai’s government, they decided to seek him out. Zalmay Khan told me that, under the Afghan monarchy, his father had been the member of parliament for the region, and the Pamiris seemed to have tapped some dormant sense of feudal responsibility in him. (“They look to me,” he said.)

During the interim administration, President Karzai had given orders regarding the Pamiris to several of his ministers, “but they didn’t take him seriously,” Zalmay Khan said. This time, he believed, the insecurity of the region’s border, which was used as a crossing point by Al Qaeda and Uzbek terrorists, meant that the government could not afford its traditional neglect.

The next time I saw Karzai, we talked about the Pamiris. When I mentioned that they had waited three months to see him, he looked shocked. “Nobody told me,” he said defensively. “Now I must find out if all the arrangements for the things they were asking for were made or not.” Karzai looked over at his aides, and said something briskly in Pashtun. One of them began scribbling on a notepad. Karzai looked back at me, and made it clear that he was ready to move on. When the conversation turned to the extremes of Afghanistan’s topography, he looked relieved.

The town of Charikar, north of Kabul, where the Shamali Plains meet the foothills of the Hindu Kush, is the gateway to the Panjshir Valley. The area was the home base of Ahmed Shah Massoud and other Tajiks in the Northern Alliance. In the election, Karzai’s share of the vote in the Panjshir was around one per cent. Afterward, Tajiks angrily accused him of having “Pashtunized” his administration by removing Northern Alliance men from their government jobs. These days, the Panjshir is something like enemy territory for Karzai. I went along on a visit he made to Charikar in March, for a road opening, and we were flown in on two American Chinook helicopters, escorted by two Apaches, two Black Hawks, and two fighter jets, which circled overhead once we landed. In the hour we were on the ground—just long enough for Karzai to dump a ceremonial load of dirt—dozens of American and Afghan guards stood by.

A few days earlier, I had been invited to dinner in Charikar at the house of Atta, a local strongman who was a former mujahideen commander. The entertainment was provided by a maskhara, or traditional Afghan jester, named Samad Pashean. Long before the recent decades of warfare, maskhara performed for the country’s monarchs; as in medieval Europe, they had license to lampoon the powerful. Pashean was one of the last remaining maskhara. He had survived the Soviet occupation, the civil war, and the Taliban years by wandering from one warlord’s base to another, plying his services. According to my host, he was also a hit man, a blackmailer, and a thief.

Pashean regaled us with skits, dances, and gossipy monologues. In one, he described how after a man insulted him he went to his house, killed him, and stole his shoes—for some reason, everyone laughed uproariously at that detail. Pointing to me, Pashean offered to kill anyone I wanted for the equivalent of two thousand American dollars. When I told him that his price was absurdly high, he good-naturedly indicated that he was ready to bargain.

Much of the humor was directed at Karzai, and it was not kind. Karzai was compared to a mountain dog who went hunting by himself, only to lose his way home in the snow. One of my dinner companions interpreted, “Karzai has been away, and with the Americans for so long, he has forgotten what Afghanistan is like.” (Not everything was political. There was also a pair of skits about brides on their wedding nights which the maskhara performed in partial burka drag. It was tame, by Western standards, but the mujahideen fighters practically wept with laughter.) Another riff involved militiamen taking part in a demobilization program but turning in only defective weapons. “We Afghans have to learn how to eat for ourselves, like cows, who, with their cuds, know how to find the good stuff to eat, and how to spit out the bad,” the maskhara concluded. “One day, we Afghans will be able to spit out Karzai.”

Ismail Khan was a test case in Karzai’s effort to reduce the power of the warlords. It was Khan who, in 1978, sparked the jihad against Afghanistan’s Soviet-backed regime by leading an Army revolt in his native city, Herat. He was a legendary battlefield commander against the Soviets and, later, the Taliban. After the overthrow of the Taliban, in 2001, Khan became the undisputed warlord of the city and the surrounding province of Herat, which borders Iran. He imposed strict Islamist discipline and kept the customs duties that were collected at the border crossings, instead of sending them to Kabul. He used much of the money to develop his city, and, before long, he was being referred to as the Emir of Herat. Khan is not as gratuitously brutal as Dostum, or as personally corrupt as some of the other warlords. But his defiance of central authority and his close relationship with Iran were a source of growing anxiety and embarrassment to Karzai and to the Americans.

Last year, during extended fighting in Herat involving several different militias—some were believed to have been acting on Karzai’s behalf—Ismail Khan’s son was killed, and his men went on a retaliatory rampage. At a critical moment, Karzai left Afghanistan to accept an award in Europe, and Ambassador Khalilzad flew to Herat. Shortly afterward, Khalilzad went on television to announce that Khan had agreed to leave Herat and join Karzai’s government. In December, Khan became the Minister of Energy. It was a stunning turn of events, one that increased Karzai’s authority, even if it had less to do with his strength than with that of the Americans who stood behind him.

An American diplomat in Kabul told me, “The institutions of the country are still very weak, and so the fact that the U.S. enjoys a lot of credibility here was a factor.” He added, “The shadow use of force can have a powerful effect on crushing the actual use of force. We had to make sure we signalled to Ismail Khan and others that the U.S. supported the President and his decisions but that we also saw a way forward for Khan. Finding roles that are dignified—and also more suited to the new circumstances—are always an important part of these solutions.”

Ismail Khan is a stocky, powerfully built man, with hard eyes and a long, flowing snow-white beard. Upon greeting him, his aides and followers kiss his hand. I visited Khan at his ministry, in a district of western Kabul that was heavily damaged in the civil war. “You know us as heroes of the jihad, but now we are known by the new title—‘warlords,’ “ he said, smiling bitterly. “During the Soviet times, we were there in the fighting, feeling the fire and smoke of the war, and everyone was awaiting the outcome, wanting us to beat them. Those who call us warlords now were sitting in their air-conditioned homes. I wish they’d spent a night with us at the front line in the war. But I know that these things are being said and done for politics or for the benefit of someone.” Khan gave me a significant look, and, as he went on, it became clear that he was referring to the United States.

Relaxing a little, Khan said, “If you go to Herat, you will see the good job I did there.” He had built new roads, provided water and electricity, and opened schools—“for both boys and girls. There are fifty-four thousand girl students in Herat.” Khan boasted that, in the short time he had been in his new job, “I’ve raised the electricity in Kabul from fifty-five to a hundred megawatts”—in contrast, he suggested, to the rest of the government, which after three years had been unable to restore basic services.

We talked for a while about the obstacles facing the government. He paused, and then blurted out, “The thing is power. Power is necessary to build, to do what I did in Herat.”

I asked whether Karzai had power, and Khan answered by speaking again about Herat. “The projects that I started are still unfinished, and now there is insecurity, too. When I was there, women could walk in the city with their children at night. Now you don’t see people out on the streets at night. In all this time, the government there has been at the service of President Karzai.”

Khan went on, “I am very depressed. I was injured three times. There are fourteen bullets in my body, and eleven members of my family have been killed. I saw forty-nine thousand people killed in Herat. In one day alone, during the fight with the Communists, twenty thousand people were killed”—Khan was referring to a vicious aerial bombardment of Herat, in March, 1979, carried out in reprisal for the slaughter of Soviet advisers and their families by his forces. “It is only random luck that I am still here. So when it was all over I wanted to rebuild my city. I managed to do some. But since I left it’s all becoming undone.”

Yunis Qanouni, the Tajik politician who came in a distant second in the Presidential election, told me, “The removal of warlordism is fine; it should be done. But people also want democracy, stability, confidence, balanced reconstruction, and economic expansion. The government does not have a proper national strategy. If you ask what is the national strategy, no one can tell you. One day, Ismail Khan is a warlord, and the next he isn’t. It is the same with General Dostum.”

We were sitting in Qanouni’s living room. He lives in an imposing, well-guarded house in Kabul’s northern suburbs decorated in an expensive, faux-Georgian style. Wearing a superbly tailored pin-striped suit, Qanouni seemed to have done very well since the fall of the Taliban.

“The problem as I see it is that the leadership is weak,” he said. “No government in Afghanistan’s history has had the international support this government has had. Karzai has been unable to take advantage of these opportunities. But maybe another person could.” Qanouni added, “These next five years will just be a transitional period.”

The drug trade, which has strengthened the warlords and corrupted Afghan officials, is in the background of any discussion of Karzai’s administration. The sheer number of people who make their living from opium and heroin has made it politically difficult for Karzai to act. On this issue, he has not had the full backing of the United States. Until recently, the Pentagon kept American troops from taking part directly in counter-narcotics efforts, which were left mostly to the British and the Europeans. Nearly eight hundred million dollars has been budgeted for counter-narcotics, but an American official in Kabul admitted that the U.S. was at a loss about how to solve the problem. Karzai has vehemently objected to one approach, the aerial spraying of poppy fields, because of its effect on farmers—a stand that seems to have irritated Washington. Last year, Karzai declared a “jihad” on the drug trade, and he has issued moral, religious, and nationalist appeals to his countrymen to stop growing poppies. He speaks wistfully of farmers returning to traditional crops, like pomegranates and honeydew melons. In the absence of a robust plan for combatting the traffickers, it’s the sort of sentiment that makes him look like a well-intentioned man but a powerless leader.

A top Afghan intelligence official told me, “What I worry about is Afghanistan becoming like Russia in the mid-nineties.” He was referring to the proliferation of gangster capitalism following the collapse of the Soviet Union. There are some signs that it is already happening. Even in the capital, warlords, strongmen, and corrupt officials are carrying out land grabs with a kind of Wild West impunity. The same tactics used for so many years in Afghanistan’s wars seem to have been redeployed to accumulate wealth.

In late 2003, the residents of a shantytown at the edge of Kabul’s most affluent district were forcibly removed, and their homes were bulldozed by police officers under the command of Kabul’s police chief. An inquiry by a U.N. official revealed that the land had been divided into lots for mansions and allocated to more than three hundred government officials, including twenty-eight of Karzai’s cabinet ministers. Fahim and Qanouni were among the beneficiaries. Karzai fired the police chief, but perhaps it was one battle that he decided not to fight, or perhaps he simply forgot about it, because the police chief was given a new senior security job, and the building of the mansions commenced.

Because Karzai is distracted by a host of issues, it is hard for him to keep smaller promises, too. The day before I left Afghanistan, I went to see the Pamiris again. Their mood was ebullient. On their first visit to the Health Ministry, they had practically been laughed out of the building, but now they had once more been promised their clinics. And the rural-development minister had told them that, while there wasn’t much chance of a helicopter, he was organizing trucks with food and blankets for three hundred families, and some shoes. When I called for an update last week, however, not much more had happened. Zalmay Khan was out of the country, and his assistant reported that, as far as he knew, the Pamiris had returned to the Wakhan Corridor empty-handed.

Hamid Karzai is not a warlord, as most Afghan politicians of the past three decades have been, and this is both the source of his credibility as a democrat and his great vulnerability—he needs the American military in order to have bargaining power. To a very real degree, Karzai is less a conventional President than something akin to a constitutional monarch. His lack of power has rendered him the public face of an administration that, despite the tension in recent weeks, effectively remains an extension of the U.S. government.

Zalmay Khalilzad’s departure for Iraq will present a test for Karzai: whether the President can function as a leader without the Ambassador at his side. (Last week, the Administration named Ronald Neumann, a diplomat based in Iraq, to replace Khalilzad.) Karzai still must find a way to balance his conciliatory instincts—the qualities that make him genuinely likable—with the need to be tough enough to confront warlords and drug traffickers and to make Afghanistan truly independent of the U.S.

As long as the balance of power remains in American hands, Karzai will appear weak to his enemies, many of whom feel that they earned on the battlefield their right to power, and who would not hesitate to use force to unseat him. In this light, President Bush’s unwillingness to cede to Karzai’s request for a face-saving role in the U.S. military operations seems shortsighted. Barnett Rubin, a scholar of Afghan affairs at New York University, told me, “Karzai is the most pro-American leader you can ask for in the Muslim world—that is, he’s trying to be a leader. But the Bush Administration certainly isn’t helping him.”

In my last interview with Karzai, he told me that he had been in Tirin Kot on December 5, 2001, when he learned that he would become Afghanistan’s President. “I was headed up to the top of the hill, because I was feeling very, very cold, and I said I will go up there and get warm. Just as I moved up, a bomb landed; the windows and the doors and everything collapsed on us, and it hit in exactly the same spot as where I was intending to go.” Karzai laughed, and said, shaking his head, “God is great.”

The bomb, an errant American missile, wounded Karzai and killed eight other people. “Nurses were cleaning my face of the debris, the blood,” Karzai said. “A call came, and when I answered it was Lyse Doucet, of the BBC, with news from Bonn. She said, ‘You have been selected to lead the government.’ So—that is the day the Taliban also came to surrender. Nine, nine-twenty, the call about Bonn. Ten o’clock, ten-fifteen, the Taliban came to surrender. One hour.”

But then I asked Karzai when he had really felt the power of the Presidency, and he replied, “I don’t know, I don’t know. I still don’t feel the difference, I still feel the same as if I were moving along, organizing meetings against the Taliban, or as if I were still in Tirin Kot. There’s no change. I don’t feel like the President or anything else—I don’t care about the Presidency or being President—I dislike power, I really dislike it. I mean, it doesn’t exist for me, I don’t feel it, you know? It’s a cup.”

He held a teacup in his hand and motioned with it. “If there’s tea in it, I enjoy the tea.”

“But not the cup?”

“I feel the cup—I don’t see power. I don’t get it. I don’t know what it is.” ♦

Jon Lee Anderson, a staff writer, began contributing to The New Yorker in 1998.